Underneath His Skin
by Cisselah
Summary: "Some day someone will get underneath that ice coated skin of yours, and it will hurt..."


**~*Underneath His Skin*~**

**written by: Cisselah **

_I am but a shape that stands here,_

_A pulseless mould, _

_A pale past picture, screening_

_Ashes gone cold._

**By: Thomas Hardy, The dead man walking**

There was many things that made him hate her. There was the dry comments and the disturbing smiles. There was the colour of her hair and the last name she carried. There was the way she moved and the clothes she wore. There was her... She made him angry so easily. A word, a gesture, and suddenly there were spells flying around and insults thrown.

"You're such a freak!" she would scream. "I hope you die!"

"You're hideous!" he would counter. "I bet_ you_ hope you die!"

The insults would go on forever. They would scream, throw things and hex each other before finally storming off. The tension in the air would make his blood rush with adrenaline and the hair on his arms stand up straight. It was a feeling of being _alive,_ something he only felt in life or death missions. The worse the arguments, the stronger the feeling would be. The stronger the feeling, the worse the arguments became. He would feel it rush up his blood like liquid fire as she threw things at him, screaming obscenities.

It was destructive. It was powerful. It was great.

He found himself looking for her, waiting for an opportunity to rile her up just to see her eyes blaze and her fists clench. Every time she would scream, the triumph would burn him. She felt alive, like a fire. Every time he was away from her he would find himself thinking of her, of new ways to annoy her. She was the most living thing in the camp, and despite the burning hatred for her he would find himself pulled towards her as if she was a black hole. No. As if she was a drug... As if he needed her...

He pushed away all those thoughts and they fuelled the fire that rushed through his veins. The arguments became worse. The bruises bigger. The emptiness between their meetings became deeper, so deep he was drowning in them. The only time he ever truly felt alive was when they were fighting.

His friends watched him closely, making sure he was always there, not lost in his thoughts of her blazing eyes and wild hair. His family, what was left of it, made up silly tasks for him to do so that he wouldn't shut himself inside his room or go out in the forest. The camp carried on. The world carried on. Their fights got worse...

"I hate you!" she would scream, even though he knew it wasn't actually the truth. "I hate you more than anyone else" And now he would hurt her. Not the silly insults from before, about her looks and intelligence, but about the deeper stuff.

"Are you sure about that darling?" he had answered mockingly one day. "'Cause I recall that you were rather smitten with me not a long time ago" Then he had curled his lips up in that arrogant, mocking, crooked smile that drove her insane. He saw how the words pierced her shield and the pain and humiliation that flashed in her eyes. She had made a hateful little sarcastic smile of her own, filled with self hatred and suffering.

"You really are a cruel person" she had told him and walked away, her back stiff from withheld hatred. And for the first time, there had been no triumph, only emptiness.

But despite the emptiness and the lack of triumph, she never got under his skin. He kept coming, he kept riling her up and sending hateful pikes about her choices and strategies, but it was by his own will, not the magnetic pull that dragged him towards her. He could stop if he wanted to. He could... Couldn't he? They kept fighting though, viciously now, hungering to hurt each other.

He kept glancing back at that day it had all begun. That day he had made that bet with Liam. The day he had destroyed her for no other reason then entertainment. Every time he recalled it there was something inside him that curled up and died. There was something inside his chest that gnawed viciously at his heart.

She had hated him afterwards, when she had picked up the pieces and begun to live again. But he hadn't really thought about it until later. Until the arguments began. Until the fire began... And his thoughts kept coming back to her. She hated him and he hated her. And still, the thought of her hating him made his chest burn. The pain fuelled the anger and he became nastier.

"James," his father had said one time after he healed the wounds. "This got to stop. You can't keep doing this. This is wrong..." There was truth in those words that he didn't want to hear, didn't want to understand, so he responded harshly, cruelly even.

"It's easy for you to say. You're the great Harry Potter, the Boy-Who-Lived, the Leader of the Light, The Chosen One... Nothing you say can be wrong, nothing you do can be wrong. You're infallible!" his father had tried to say something, but he hadn't given him the chance. "And still we suffer underneath the rule of Him. Of the one _you're _supposed to defeat. You hide us all away in this pitiful rat hole, safe behind the wards!" he had sneered,"But the truth is that you failed, you were wrong! So don't you talk to me about right and wrong! Don't you dare!"

There had been an awful tormented look in his fathers face and for a moment the two of them had stood there, motionless like two statues. Then his father had left and he was alone again... And the arguments became worse.

"You're a cold, cruel person" she had told him once. "You don't care for anyone but yourself! But truth is, Potter, that some day someone will get underneath that ice coated skin of yours, and it will hurt..."

He had laughed at her, even had been nothing to laugh at. The fire in his blood had burned him and filled him with pleasure at the same time. Pain and pleasure mixed so tightly together that he hadn't been able to separate them from each other. And she was the one responsible for it. He hated her for it, and still he kept coming back.

His father tried to keep him away from her, to stop the fire and the sparks and the fights. Finally he was placed in an undercover unite outside camp, away from her. And the fights stopped. But the fire didn't. It kept building up inside him, a nuclear bomb ready to explode at any moment.

His thoughts was wrapped around her image. Around her blood-red lips and blazing eyes, her wild cherry hair and flushed cheeks. Every little detail circled around his mind until he could describe her every line, until he could count the stars in her eyes, until he could draw sketchbooks filled of her face. He knew the way she bit her lip when she was unsure of something, the way she screamed when she was angry, the way she laughed when she happy. He knew her. Her picture was painted in his mind with cold precision and blazing heat. It bugged him to no end.

At night after those long days of spying and eavesdropping he would lie in his bed and picture her perfect face in his mind. He would count the stars in her blazing eyes and imagine the smell of vanilla and the ocean. Thoughts about what he would say to her when he came home circled in his head, how he would mock her and rile her up once again to see her eyes blaze. Only then would the fire be let out and there would be no more painful tugging in his heart.

He knew thought, that it would be weeks, perhaps months, until he could return home and see her again.

And that, was the reason to why he was so surprised when he opened the door one day to see her standing there, her eyes blazing and her cherry hair cascading down her shoulders.

"Let me in, Potter..." she had demanded him and still in shock he had obeyed. She had marched in, closed all the windows and turned to him with something entirely new in her eyes. "There's no time left" she had told him and with a pang in his chest he had noticed that she was afraid. So afraid she hadn't even checked who he was. Which could only mean one thing. "Death Eaters... They've discovered you. They are tracking you down now as we speak. You have to come with me, back to the camp"

The fire was back and despite the urgent tone of her voice he had felt a need to be difficult, like a child. "Why would I do that?" he had asked. She had stared at him for a moment.

"Are you deaf?" she had asked harshly. "Death Eaters are after you. Death E-a-t-e-r-s..." she had said the last word slowly, like he was a child that didn't understand. Something inside him rose up towards the challenge.

"And?" he had asked with that crooked smile he knew made her want to curse him. Her eyes had narrowed and he had known she would curse him if it hadn't been for the hurry they were in.

"Death Eaters, Potter! The bad guys? The ones who wants to torture you before stringing you up like a naked piece of meat for the crows to feed on! Death Eaters! Remember?" she had shouted in his face. He hadn't moved a muscle.

"And?" he had asked with the same crooked smile on his lips.

He ducked the curse with a moment's notice.

"No need to get upset" he had told her. That was when he noticed the tears in her eyes and froze. She had never cried before. Never... No matter how bad the arguments went, she had never before shed a tear. For a moment he had wanted to reach out, wipe her tears away and scoop her up in his arms. Then he had remembered where he was and with who. The unwanted feeling got stuffed deep down in the corner of his mind until later on.

"You don't understand" she had told him and voice had been balancing on the edge of breaking. With a strange feeling in the lower part of his intestines he had watched her look at him with pleading eyes. "Please, James..." a shiver of something that was half pleasure half pain ran through his body at the foreign sound of his name from her lips. He didn't understand exactly what was happening, only that the fire in his veins was burning bright and he didn't like it when she cried.

"Just come with me..." she had pleaded. "Please, I... I couldn't live with it if something happened..." She broke of and he noticed that he must have been wearing a very strange expression in the damp light from behind the curtains. Discretely she tried to wipe away her tears. There was something underneath the tears that glittered with an emotion he hadn't know she could have possessed.

"Okay" he had told her, because he couldn't handle all the tears streaming of her cheeks. "Lets go..." She had given him a smile that made his heart beat harder, and then she had turned and...

BAM...

Smoke... Screams... Green and red lights... The smell of sulfur and dust and blood and death... He couldn't see and he couldn't breath. All that mattered was surviving the thick, grey smoke and the cloaked figures. All that mattered was to find her and take her far, far away. He had to find her... One moment she had been right at his side and the next she was a ghost of a memory. Panicked questions had run through his mind. Where was she? Was she okay?

Green streaks of light... More screams... Something warm splattering over his face and arms and robes. Black marks on the walls...

The smoke was clearing. In the darkness he caught a glimpse of wild cherry hair and bright flashes. He had headed towards them and fought to keep his lunch down. Only a little bit longer... Then he would grab her hand and they would apparate out and everything would be fine. Just a little bit longer and then he would...

"NO!" a flash of green. A body collapsing like a puppet with all it's strings cut of. He had caught her before she could fall and hurt herself. He had grabbed her tight and fled from the green lights and smoke and screams. He had wanted to get away from the apartment and the men in white masks before they could hurt her.

_She can't be hurt... _A whisper in his mind had told him. _She can't be hurt because she's already... _No. No, she wasn't hurt at all. She was alive and she wasn't hurt and she was alive! She couldn't be... Couldn't be... He had sunk down on the warm grass and stared at her empty eyes and wild cherry hair.

No... No-no-no-no-no... This wasn't right. This wasn't how it was supposed to be. This was some wierd dream that he was going to wake up from at any moment now. This wasn't... It couldn't be...

But it was... Her eyes had always been shining bright and blazing with emotions... Now they were glassy and dead like a porcelain doll. Her skin was chalky white and her face no longer full of emotions. She was blank, wiped out. Dead... Dead just like all the others.

Images flashed through the back of his mind. Images of other eyes, dead eyes... Images of chalky white skin and limp bodies, of lips parted in pain and of cherry blossoms of red spreading over dirty clothes. He couldn't focus on anything else then the way her body felt colder and colder against his skin for every second that passed, the way a white membrane spread over her once so blazing eyes.

This wasn't right. It shouldn't have been her. Anyone but her... He would have taken that green light to the chest instead of her if he only had had the chance.

_"Please, I... I couldn't live with it if something happened..."_ Her voice was a echo in the empty space between his ears. It bounced around, as soon as he had deflected one strike came the next. And for every time he remembered the words his chest would hurt a little more. The fire had turned into a dark vortex of emptiness. I sucked all the happiness and light and beauty out of the world.

_"I couldn't live with it if something happened..."_ Something did happen. And she couldn't live through it.

"No!" He shouted to whatever vengeful god that had taken her from him. "Anyone but her!" He cradled her body in his arms. Stroked her hair and pulled his jacket over her chest so that she would be so cold, so painfully cold...

He sat there for an eternity. He sat there until the tears on his chins froze to small crystals of ice. He sat there until his lips turned blue from the cold. He sat there until darkness embraced them and the moon lit up her face, and just for a moment, it looked as if she alive, watching the stars with an expression of wonder on her face.

Somewhere along the road he had begun to think about her as more then the annoying little girl that talked back when he tried to boss her around. Somehow the fire had melted the ice that clung to his heart and skin without him even noticing. She had been right... He thought as he numbly watched the lights of the Resistance search for them, knowing that they would find not one corpse, but two, one still breathing but empty as night, for a part of him had died the moment she had fell.

_"Some day someone will get underneath that ice coated skin of yours, and it will hurt..."_ She had said. And somehow it had happened without him noticing it. Somehow her prediction had come true in the worst possible way.

She had gotten underneath his skin, into his blood. And it hurt...

**No, I do not own Harry Potter. (Though it doesn't stop me from dreaming!)**

**So, what do you think! Good, hmm? Push the Review button, pleaseeeeeeeee... Anyway, on the more important stuff. I don't speak English as my native language, so if you find any fault you better send an e-mail to me so that I can correct it straight away. I tried out something different this time, so I hope it was good. XD**

**For you guys who didn't get it, the main character in this story is James S. Potter, in a world where Harry Potter didn't defeat the Dark Lord in the end of book 7. Instead he built up the Resistance, and the camp where they live. So the fight between good and Moldywart isn't over! Behold my story J.K Rowling! And bow to the Dark Lord!**

**Anyway, hope you liked it. XD **

**With love / A.C**


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